Thursday, August 9, 2012

My first MMO

With the upcoming release of World of
Warplanes I thought I would blog about the time I discovered online
flight combat over 20 years ago and how such a revolutionary MMO has
been completely overlooked and forgotten in time.

I'm talking about Kesmai Corporations
Air Warrior. Kesmai started in the early 80's with the then
successful MUD Islands of Kesmai, naturally the graphics were nothing
to write home about but it was good for its time. Towards the end of
the 80's Kesmai released Air Warrior with wireframe graphics,
although it looked pretty poor it was just the beginning of many
updates that would improve it dramatically until its death in 2001.

I played a few times around 1990 with a
2.4k modem but didn't seriously start playing until AW SVGA came out
around 1993. At that time (living in the UK) the World Wide Web was
barely starting and most people playing online games used DOS with
dial up modems to Bulletin Board Systems which amounted to massive
phone bills, by 1994 along with the subscription fee's I was spending
up to $400 a month just to play this game which makes todays
subscriptions seem tame.

Air Warrior was basically a WW2 flight
sim that multiple players could fly via a single server, for the UK
it was the long gone Online Entertainment in London and GEnie in the
US (later many other portals/hosts emerged on CRIS, Delphie, AOL,
Gamestorm, Compuserve, Earthlink etc.). Around 93-94 I regularly flew
with I recall about 100-150 people on the same server, lag could be
nasty at times but on the whole it worked quite well considering game
server technology was still pretty new and expensive.

Squadrons (Guilds) started forming and
with it a taste of MMO's to come. I flew with the UK Kraits squadron
from around 94 until the end, most of the players I met in those days
worked in IT and because of the huge costs mostly middle aged
businessmen (and wives), there were a few conventions both sides of
the pond and I got to meet some really great people. There was no "I
pwnd you" or "Noob" talk in those days, everyone
helped each other and winning or losing was not a cause for a tantrum.

Originally flight was almost arcade
style in AW, later on realism was added and it became a whole
different game with spins/stalls etc. Every time you died you had to
respawn at one of your sides intact airfields, take off and start
your long climb to head to the action which could be 5-10 minutes of
flying.

There were 3 sides in a persistent
world, blue red or green, a 3 faction war but with no political or
national allegiances just like World of Tanks/Warplanes, you could
fly aircraft from any nation ranging from fighters to bombers, some
of the planes were multiplayer (like the POB ships in SWG and
Planetside Galaxies). In a B17 for example you could fill all the gun
positions with your squad/team members and have 7 of you in one
plane. The original continent consisted of airfields and factories,
by knocking out any of these targets you could affect fuel/ammo
supplies and close airfields, you could fly a C47 and drop NPC
paratroopers to capture airfields which your side could then start
flying from. Players could also drive Flak Panzers to defend airbases
which often led to some nice strafing runs.

Because of the strategy required to
take an airfield close teamwork was required and as in RL bombers
required fighter escort and airfields required CAP, many players made
a name for themselves as Aces and when you saw their name approaching
it was quite nerve wracking.

Around the mid to late 90's new maps
were introduced covering Europe and the Pacific, along with this big
server events started appearing regularly, in these events if you
died you were are out of the event until it was finished and couldn't
take off again. I recall one Pacific event where my Squad was tasked
with bombing an enemy aircraft carrier, allied squads were given the
task of taking airfields and providing cap for our bases. I was
flying a Torpedo bomber in this event along with around 6 other TB's
and around 5 fighter escort. It took about 10 minutes to gain
altitude to the max height and another 10 minutes of flying over the
ocean until we spotted the target. Enemy cap was by this time at the same altitude and soon homed in on
us, I managed to Dive and possibly get a hit on the carrier before I died, I
can't remember how many of my squad survived but I had to sit out the
rest of the evening in the lobby reading the text messages typed by
players still in game. There was no teamspeak in those days. I couldn't see people having the patience for
this now but at the time it felt epic, I even had a bunch of friends
round with a few crates of beer to watch the event :)

In the late 90's the UK host closed
down and everyone joined the US servers, my memory is hazy but I seem
to recall maybe 300+ people flying on the same server maps at the
same time so by those standards in those days it should be recognized
as an MMO, even though people still argue against it.

After playing around one day and
discovering that the aircraft skins were just uncompressed bmp's I
brought it up at a UK conference around 1998 and decided to proceed
with writing an add-on for the game that could switch skins (Later
called Scenario Aircraft Converter). Working closely with squad
members to get the interface and functionality just right the first
version was released around 1999 and it was well received. Once
people realised how easy it was to design their own skins a load of
artists started churning out historically accurate paint schemes.
Shortly after I discovered you could also edit the Ground texture so
added that to the add-on and some truly stunning terrains followed.
At the last count I believe it was 14,000 downloads of the SAC
utility, if only I had charged $1 for it lol.

After creating the SAC add-on I then
managed to decode the sound files and turn them into Wav's so that
new user sounds could be added, not as popular amongst players but it
did help further enhance the game. Not sure if it is true but I heard
a rumor years later that Kesmai had lost the original code to create
the sound files so this could have proved useful if the game had
survived.

In 1999 Electronic Arts bought Kesmai,
there was a new version of AW around 2000, although the game was
still popular and affordable EA killed it dead in 2001. I enjoyed
maybe 7-8 years of AW and still miss it so the upcoming World of
Warplanes is definitely on my list, whether EA could have continued
to develop the game and improve its success up to the time when WOW
was about to emerge will never be known, it was the time when the
internet was becoming more accessible and a perfect market for
subscriptions to the new genre of MMO's but EA it seems had no
foresight of how popular MMO's would become.

Sadly after losing all my source code
and files a long time ago I have barely any screenshots of AW at its
peak, all the websites that hosted skins and terrains are also long
gone even http://archive.org/ has no images from 10 years ago. All
the players I knew have moved on and I rarely hear of any of them
anymore, it was a good (but expensive) experience, RIP AW Dec 7th
2001.